PhD Students Brannan and Hubai Accepted as HASTAC Scholars

Two PhD students in GMU’s Department of History and Art History, Laura Brannan and Janine Hubai, have been accepted as HASTAC Scholars. The HASTAC scholarship program supports graduate students across many colleges and universities who are working at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities, and sciences. The scholars accepted to the program join a cohort across the more than two hundred institutions that participate worldwide.

Brannan and Hubai are both working on a digital project around Black Lives Matters and the racial reckoning of the United States. They have worked with GMU’s Professor Spencer Crew, interim director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on building a digital history project that will help contextualize the racial history of statues that are currently contested. Their project focuses in particular on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia—one of the nation’s hubs for protests around Confederate statues—as well as on statues of Ulysses S. Grant. This work in progress will be part of their participation in the HASTAC program, and both will also have opportunities to extend their professional and interdisciplinary connections.